
There are pragmatic reasons why Donald Trump wants the United States to acquire Greenland. Because of climate change, its melting ice cap could unlock oil, gas, and rare earth minerals essential for advanced technology. Greenland is also well-positioned to take advantage of new shipping routes in the ever-warmer Arctic Ocean, which could provide a northern alternative to the Panama Canal (which Trump also wants). The island is already home to an American air base that hosts an early warning system for ballistic missiles, so is key to North America’s defense perimeter. But there are other, more primal reasons for Trump’s territorial fervor. In his first term, he remarked of Greenland, “I love maps. And I always said: ‘Look at the size of this. It’s massive. That should be part of the United States.’” In other words, the Danish territory has value beyond its economic potential and strategic location. As the biggest island in the world, it’s also a status symbol: a suitably immense signifier of America’s newly reclaimed greatness.1
From boyhood onward, I, like Trump, loved maps. And like him, I was fascinated by Greenland: so massive, blank, and mysterious. The name itself is simple yet alluring, communicating freshness and fertility. (That’s no coincidence; the island was specifically given an attractive name to entice Norse settlers.) As a young Canadian, I idly imagined Canada adding the island to its already expansive northern territories. After all, Greenland is geographically contiguous with the Canadian Arctic Archipelago, and would buttress our national identity as “the True North strong and free.” Canada already has an Inuit satrapy, the territory of Nunavut, so would be well suited to incorporate the largely related people of Greenland. What business do the Danes have in North America, anyway? The time of the Vikings has passed. The future belongs to Canada. Alas, I shelved my dreams of Canadian expansionism and ultimately moved to the United States, where the idea has now planted itself in the mind of the President.
Map Appeal
To a significant degree, the allure of Greenland is the allure of the map. While the map is not the territory, and representation is not reality, symbolism still matters. Nations seek independence for political representation, but also for visual representation: because they want to see their tribe’s name on a map, equal in status to other tribes. Consider the case of Quebec in my native Canada. In addition to assuming normal provincial responsibilities like healthcare and education, Quebec also has its own Napoleonic-inspired civil code, French-language protection laws, and Francophone-prioritizing immigration system, among other unique attributes. Quebec is also Canada’s largest beneficiary of equalization payments, which means that it receives money from richer provinces to fund its social programs. On the national level, Canada is officially bilingual, even though French fluency is rare in Anglophone provinces.2 In practice, the Quebecois (who are more likely to speak both languages) thus receive preferential treatment for federal jobs.
Yet despite all the benefits that Quebec receives in Canada, the province has a popular secessionist movement, which almost succeeded in gaining independence in a 1995 referendum. No matter how much Canada tries to accommodate the French, it will never be able to offer them the full trappings of a nation-state: a national anthem to sing, a national flag to (theoretically) kill and die for, and, yes, a national territory boldly outlined on a map. For ardent sovereigntists, the softer lines of a province don’t cut it. On the anti-secessionist side, many Canadians are loath to see their country greatly reduced in size. Worse, an independent Quebec would cut off the Maritime provinces, bifurcating Canada into a large western rump and a smaller set of lumps to the east. It’s economically disruptive and personally inconvenient to have to pass through another country to get to the rest of your own. But more viscerally, a lack of contiguity signals weakness and disunity, which is made glaringly obvious on a map. Pakistan and Bangladesh (formerly East Pakistan) didn’t last as one country, separated as they were by the vast gulf of India. How would a Canada split asunder by Quebec fare?3

In the Middle East, irredentism and religious zealotry have largely driven Palestinian rejection of a two-state solution.4 But if partition could result in a more attractive-looking country, peace might stand a greater chance. Instead, Palestinians are concentrated in the West Bank and Gaza, two separate exclaves separated by Israel. The West Bank itself is divided by Israeli settlements, complicating a clean geopolitical break.5 Trump’s own previously proposed two-state solution, which would carve up the West Bank to accommodate Israeli enclaves and security concerns, would result in perhaps the ugliest country ever conceived, a Swiss cheese of a Palestine. (Though the 1947 UN Partition Plan for Palestine, which the Jews accepted and Arabs rejected, would have also produced two bizarrely shaped states.6) My own preferred out-of-the-box solution, the Hashemite Kingdom of Palestine, would assuage Israeli security concerns by placing the West Bank and Gaza under Jordan’s monarchy, while addressing Palestinian pride by giving them a titular state even bigger than Israel.7 After all, what’s the point of independence if you can barely see your country on a map?8

Pride (In the Name of Territory)
Pride is an underrated factor in geopolitics. The United States doesn’t need to annex Greenland to deter rivals like Russia and China from the North American Arctic. Via Denmark, Greenland is already part of NATO, which is a dependable (and dependent) American ally. And economically, per the Department of Commerce, “Denmark is a firm advocate of liberal trade and investment policies and actively encourages foreign investment.” American companies could harness Greenland’s newly available natural resources without the formality of ownership. Alternatively, were Greenland to secede from Denmark, its 57,000 residents would be even more susceptible to American influence, regardless of formal sovereignty. The United States is often pejoratively called an “empire” precisely because of its massive economic and cultural influence, its leadership of international alliances like NATO, and its network of 750+ military bases around the world (including, as previously mentioned, in Greenland already). By contrast, raising the Stars and Stripes over Greenland’s capital, Nuuk, is mere showmanship. But, of course, Trump is a consummate showman.
As my youthful fantasies of a Greater Canada indicate, I recognize the symbolic value of political geography. In principle, I’m also not opposed to adjusting borders where they don’t make sense. For example, most countries in the Middle East were created after World War I to reflect the imperial interests of the British and the French. Consequently, Iraq—a hodgepodge of disparate former Ottoman provinces—is a state for no particularly good reason. On the other hand, Kurdistan—the homeland of a cohesive nation—has long been denied its independence. Less seriously, it’s absurd that tiny Denmark owns the largest island in the world, which is located on another continent and largely inhabited by another people. But borders must be adjusted carefully, lest a semi-functional global order (further) devolve into the law of the jungle. Today, America annexes Greenland. Tomorrow, China annexes Taiwan? Greenlanders should have the right to (be bribed to) join America, just as in, the 20th century, Newfoundland voted to join Canada, Sikkim elected to join India, and Germany opted to reunify. But when it behaves like a bully,9 the United States becomes a less attractive country to join—and, more critically, to admire and follow—in the first place.
See
’s bullish take on purchasing Greenland: “America’s land mass would increase by 20% overnight. On some 2D maps, Greenland looks bigger than Africa. Little boys like my sons will grow up feeling in their bones that America is big and Europe is small.” As far back as 1868, a report commissioned by Secretary of State William Seward noted: “In considering the future of Greenland, we cannot confine ourselves entirely to materialistic considerations. Nations have other resources besides those which figures can express to us by statistical tables. If a country has in it the means of developing man in any way, physically or mentally, it may be said to be rich to that extent.”Canada’s only officially bilingual province is New Brunswick, which has a substantial French-speaking Acadian population. Outside of Quebec and New Brunswick, no Canadian province is as much as 5% Francophone.
There are some successful cases of countries with non-contiguous territory. But they generally consist of what is essentially a “mainland,” home to the bulk of the nation, and a peripheral, sparsely populated “land island.” Examples include the continental United States (339 million people) plus Alaska (741,147 people) and transcontinental Russia (145 million people) plus the Kaliningrad Oblast (1 million people). By contrast, the Maritimes hold greater demographic and historic significance to Canada, and might also be tempted to join the contiguous United States in the event of Quebec’s separation.
They’ve also played a role on the Israeli side, of course, but the Palestinians have a longer track record of sabotaging peace negotiations and rejecting co-existence.
I agree with historian Benny Morris that “settlements and the occupation are obstacles to peace, without doubt; but the bigger obstacle is the essential rejectionism of the Palestinian national movement.” Israel has evacuated settlements before, in Gaza and Sinai, and has offered to do so in the West Bank as part of peace negotiations. Nevertheless, while Palestinian rejectionism is the primary impediment to peace, the settlements (especially given their haphazard, illogical distribution) are also clearly a roadblock.
The 1937 Peel Commission proposed a cleaner north-south partition of Palestine, with most of the territory going to the Arabs, the Jews receiving the Galilee and a coastal strip, and the British administering an “international zone” centered around Jerusalem. The Zionists approved the plan as a basis for further negotiations, while the Arabs rejected it.
Gaza would still function as an exclave in this scenario, but it would be more akin to the “land island” model outlined above. Conceivably, Gaza might also be joined to Egypt.
The “three-state solution,” as advocated, for example, by
, calls for separate Palestinian states in the West Bank and Gaza. (Or, per , a Palestinian state in Gaza and a binational Jewish-Palestinian state in the West Bank.) While this addresses the contiguity question, it neglects the larger issue of Palestinian pride.Trump has threatened to “tariff Denmark at a very high level” if it doesn’t sell Greenland, and refused to rule out the use of force. He’s applied similarly bellicose rhetoric to Panama over its canal and Canada over its, well, independence. (Though in the case of Canada, he’s “merely” threatened to use economic force.)